Take Cover: Bon Iver: Bon Iver

Artist Gregory Euclide on his surreal landscape sleeve

Notable record covers help to define artists. With Take Cover, we aim to track down the most striking sleeves and get the stories behind them.

Over the last few years, Minnesota artist Gregory Euclide has racked up an impressive list of gallery and museum showings for his skewed, three-dimensional take on the traditional landscape painting. His surreal and woodsy cover for Bon Iver's sophomore album is an excellent representation of his overall style; the original piece-- made specifically for the record-- is a surreal swirl of paint, melted snow, pine cones, and more. By including unorthodox, found elements in his work, Euclide offers art that not only depicts nature but emulates its cycle of transformation, too.

We recently called the artist at his river valley home south of Minneapolis, and spoke about the strange story of his entwined history with Bon Iver leader Justin Vernon, and the details and inspiration behind his cover. Click on for the Q&A as well as close-up photos of the piece and a making-of video, courtesy of Euclide's website.

"My work deals with growth and decay; there's this lush green stuff, but it also feels like it's breaking down."

Pitchfork: Both you and Justin Vernon are from Wisconsin. How did you meet him?

Gregory Euclide: It's a weird story. About ten years ago, I was dating a girl in Rochester, New York who was working at an Outback Steakhouse, and she invited me out to dinner with these high school kids she was working with at the time. I exposed them to people like Gillian Welch and Uncle Tupelo, and they moved to Eau Claire, Wisconsin and started a band named after me called Dinner With Gregg-- initially, they were like a rival band to Justin's band. Eventually, Justin convinced them to play together, and they formed [Vernon's pre-Bon Iver band] DeYarmond Edison-- but I didn't know about this connection until about a year ago.

Anyway, years later I met Sara-- the high school friend of Justin's who he wrote [For Emma, Forever Ago] about-- through my present fiancée. It was right when that record was taking off, and she was like, "This album was kind of named after me." I was like, "Holy shit."

So Sara posts on Justin's Facebook, like, "Hey, I know you're looking for [artwork], you should look this guy up." And then one of the guys from the band Dinner with Gregg writes on Justin's Facebook: "You know this is Greg from Dinner with Gregg, right?!" All these worlds just collided. So, knowing all that, Justin looked at my work, bought a piece and, about a year later, we hooked up for the album cover.

Pitchfork: On the surface, the cover is reminiscent of a kitschy painting that your grandmother would have on her wall. What's your take on that comparison?

GE: The history of landscape painting is where my work takes its roots from. And those things are always political. Nowadays, you have to search to find those bucolic vistas in real life, and 99% of the time they're shit-- there's a galvanized steel guard rail in front of you and cigarette butts and Doritos bags all around. But people climb out of their cars, take photos of these vistas, and then get back in their cars and drive away on a road that was made by tearing half of a mountain face away.

So I'm putting these totally kitschy, idealized landscapes inside of these paintings that are just torn apart. I include all this garbage in them-- the Bon Iver cover has found styrofoam in it (below)-- and I cut them up to expose the illusion of those types of paintings.

Pitchfork: Did you talk to Justin about why he liked your work?

GE: He initially sent me this really long e-mail with about 30 of my paintings in there with notes about which parts he liked. It'd be like if someone gave you 30 different Led Zeppelin riffs and beats and said, "Make a song out of that." But I didn't feel like I was too directed because it was all based on stuff I was doing anyway-- it wasn't like he wanted puppies.

Pitchfork: What were some themes you guys wanted to touch on with this piece?

GE: Our life philosophies are pretty similar. He wanted to deal with transformation a lot. If the last album was about loss, then this one was going to be about birth. And a lot of my work deals with growth and decay; there's this lush green stuff, but it also feels like it's breaking down.

Pitchfork: That sense of transformation is really apparent on the cover, like how the left side looks like it's peeling away (above).

GE: I used to do these pieces where I would put four pieces of paper on a wall and I'd paint a vignette on one then rip through it and paint another one, and rip through that, and all the paper would get inter-meshed and the paint from the previous one would drip down onto the next. It would end up being this torn-up mess, but each paper was a moment in time that I was working through. So, for this, I didn't want to keep it flat and I wanted to make the part that's dripping through blood red to show the vibrancy of this material underneath the surface.

Pitchfork: I'll admit, I didn't realize a lot of the details were three dimensional until I watched the making-of videos on your website. Is it important to you that people are aware of those details?

GE: Yeah, for sure. In the process, I used only melted snow and I got all those pine cones from the area where Justin is from in Wisconsin. I wanted people to be able to see that I used geranium seeds from people's gardens, for example.

Watch a video of Euclide putting the cover together:

Pitchfork: I was curious about the house in the middle of the cover, because the last Bon Iver album was imbued with this mythology about how Justin made it by himself holed-up in a cabin...

GE: The house came about because Justin was talking a lot about isolation. But my fiancée saw it and was like, "Oh! Is that supposed to be his cabin in the woods?" and I was like, "Fuck!" I showed it to Justin, and he was like, "I don't know about that..." I told him, "It's not your cabin, it's more that feeling of being alone-- the single house on the plains." You drive through Northern Minnesota or Wisconsin and you'll see one house in 40 minutes and you wonder, "Shit, what happens if power goes out in the winter?" It's that feeling of remoteness.

Check out more making-of videos here and more detailed shots of the original piece here.